333 karma · joined June 24, 2010
In the last couple of years we've seen demonstrations of growing body parts to order from your stem cells. Heck, when you think about it, a good part of modern medicine seems like science fiction by mid-20th century standards.
As for the "teleportation", demonstrations of quantum effects have been around for quite a while. I remember having my mind blown back in the 1960s when I read up on how the tunnel diode <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel_diode>; was a practical demonstration of quantum tunnelling.
The jetpack entry made me smile. Last year there was an episode of NCIS whose plot revolved around jetpack technology. McGee, the computer geek member of the team, was so taken with the technology that he had created his own video presentation of jetpack history and would inflict it upon his team mates in a manner similar to pictures taken on his vacation.
Here's that missing link: <http://www.webstock.org.nz/blog/2010/the-blast-shack/>;
Asus differentiates its wide range of netbooks with price point variations based on different battery specs, hard drive size, Bluetooth, etc.
The only variation I can see for commercial roll-out would be in, say, the 3G module added by a particular service provider. Given what has happened with the added "features" of some Android devices, I'm not sure that a Verizon-specific Chromebook would be a big seller. A vendor-specific would seem to lead to contracts and account personalization details that would kill the anonymity focus of the device.
I think the biggest problem I have with it is that -- barring a revolutionary cheap price point -- there seems to be no Unique Selling Proposition or compelling use case that distinguishes it from the capabilities of existing netbooks.
I mean, if you're comparing running a Chrome browser under Windows 7 Starter with running the Chrome "OS" on top of Linux, it seems to me the biggest difference will be the option of persistent storage, not the polish of the user experience.
That said, I have two netbooks and both are dual-booting Windows 7 Starter and Ubuntu 10.10 desktop.
The preferred euphemism used to be "non-standard", which still leaves the problem of defining "standard" English.
I don't know how you can call something "pre-beta" if you're giving it a release outside the organization. It's not as if Google didn't know people would be commenting on it. What does that term mean?
1) Just because it isn't ready yet doesn't mean it won't be someday,
2) It has a better chance of being improved because it's closer than other Google projects to their company's core competency, and
3) The market may not be ready for it yet.
Even if I grant the first two, that last point is problematic. While there are plenty of people who like keeping their data in the cloud, I get the impression the Chrome OS use case is for people who only want their data in the cloud. I wonder how many machines that will equal, given that we've just had a couple of decades of laptop usage and having more than one computer is popular.
Tangentially, at the risk of sounding like a 2nd cousin to rms, I find I'm still a trifle irked that Android and Chrome are being referred to as operating systems when in fact they're new user interfaces stuck on top of Linux.
The nub of our disagreement: the definition of an embedded system. Per Wikipedia, "An embedded system is a computer system designed to perform one or a few dedicated functions often with real-time computing constraints."
So a cheap MP3 player counts as an embedded system, because playing audio is what its hardware and software is designed for. A personal computer, in whatever physical form, that runs a variety of applications, including audio players, is not an embedded system. And therefore, no, I don't count smart phone applications as embedded systems software. If you're writing device drivers that are burned into a smart phone's ROM, on the other hand, then I'd consider it embedded software.
When you find hardware running Android that's designed to be dedicated to a single task, such as, say, a climate control system, then you can count it as an embedded system. A tablet PC or an application running on it that sends commands to your existing climate control system, not so much.
Perhaps we have different notions of embedded systems. I'm thinking of self-contained computers/microcontrollers that are part of a larger system/product with a significant incentive to keep hardware costs to a minimum. As in, use the cheapest processor and least amount of RAM as you can. Now that covers a large range, from 8-bit microcontrollers to high-end systems running real time OSs. The last time I was seriously following that field, however, the hands down favorite language was C. I would be greatly surprised if Java had even risen in usage to rival Forth in the embedded domain. If you have some contrasting data to provide, feel free.
I'll give you partial credit for thinking of J2ME in mobile phones. But there's still a significant difference between programming games in J2ME or Flash for a phone and using Jave to program the phones themselves (ie, the underlying embedded system). Why do you think Nokia's recommendation for application builds was either gcc or, for those building their own phone ROMs, the proprietary ARM compiler?
My point with the Microsoft language products of the 1980s was that they were willing to sell a variety of products if people were willing to buy them. They had Microsoft versions of Fortran, C, and Pascal as well. Xenix was their server solution back then, but that didn't really matter for that state of the market. The mention of the Zune was intended to highlight that the technical merits are dwarfed by right-place-and-time effects. I knew plenty of people who thought J++ was the wave of the future because, you know, that API lock-in is such a determinant for success.
As to Java, I never said that it was unsuccessful. But Sun kept trying to flog Java as an embedded systems solution and it was an exercise in futility, whether it was the original set-top boxes, JINI, or those incredibly useful Java personalization ID rings like the one I have somewhere in a desk drawer. Having a major player pitch still didn't make it popular in embedded markets.
Woulda-coulda-shoulda arguments about Lisp only lacking major backers are arguments based on a lack of data. If major backers are so key, then why were Python and Ruby so successful?
Microsoft actually did have a diversity approach for their language tools division in the 1980s -- ever heard of MuLISP? The problem was that Lisp on MS-DOS or Windows 3 was not really a good fit for most (any?) personal computer at that time. Certainly not when compared with the likes of Turbo Pascal, say.
It seems to me that programming languages get their moment in the sun if they offer some significant technical advantage for that particular time and market. Perl took off because it did seem better for some things at the time, for example, while the latest versions have seemed (to me, at least) as a desperate cry for attention when other dynamic languages have gotten most of the programmer love.
If there's anything the last dozen years of language adoption have shown us, it is that "promotion" is only part of the equation and it can manifest in either a top-down or bottom-up fashion. (See Python or Ruby for examples of the latter.)
As to how the evaluator got to his claim of creative reasoning in the students, the OECD test includes both multiple-choice and open-response questions. Presumably the latter was the basis for the evaluator's assessment.
Seriously, how many Googles or Facebooks does China need to create internally for its needs? Is there any reason to believe their internal markets are being significantly held back by too much derivative software?
As to Mao and the stifling of innovation, my limited reading of history doesn't paint him as a big champion of diversity during the Great Leap Forward. How many millions died because of that bright idea of encouraging farmers to kill the evil sparrows that were eating the people's grain?
To cite the field of software and content for examples is a mistake, I believe, because it's based on a presupposition that IP can't, won't, or shouldn't approach zero cost. If I were a Chinese administrator, I wouldn't care much if the blogging software my people were using was a clone of something from the West nearly as much as I'd be concerned that their creativity of expression was kept within the bounds of the Greater Good.
Had he argued that his points were valid simply because they hadn't been disproven, then it would have been an argument from ignorance.
Just because someone makes an assertion without attaching footnotes does not make it a fallacy.
I was dubious about the link from the "X things about Y" style of title, but left as soon it looked like a more stylish version of a Web slide show. I hate slide shows; if a site doesn't offer an obvious "all slides on one page" option, I'm out of there.
(Edit: Yes, there is a TOC link, but that page also evoked a tc;dc response.)
break your password into two hands' worth of typing, the first part on one hand is the same string of gibberish at all locations, the second hand adds a location-specific suffix of shorter gibberish.
If you pick a simple algorithm for going from location to suffix, you only have one hard-to-divine string to memorize -- and that's the hand you practice all the time.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go shoo some kids off the lawn...
I've got three of these in a JBOD server, running a couple of months without incident. They're cheap, quiet, and low-power. They're not high-performance, however, and not ideally suited to RAID applications. Also, given the new sector size you can get dreadful performance from them if you aren't careful in setting your partition boundaries.
Having suffered the consequences of ignoring data safety rules in the past, I now make a practice of having three copies of important data in at least two separate locations. I'm frankly astonished that there apparently wasn't a differential backup process at the company. I mean, a month's down time, WTF? These hard disks are pretty darn cheap backup media if you've got lots of data (e.g. video files), but after this item I'm wondering if biodiversity should be among my archive criteria.
That the drives in question had "chemical degredation on the surface making the data recovery much slower and harder" is a puzzler to me. Perhaps there's something about today's drive materials I'm unaware of, but my CYA radar went off on that choice of words: someone screwed up during the recovery process would be my first suspicion.
Two data points: 1) I recently bought a netbook via Amazon even though it was a new model and Amazon's price was near list and above most other search results -- because of their superior return policy and faster (semi-free) delivery; 2) I recently discovered some backpack clips I liked but declined to buy them at Amazon at $2.16 per clip because a search indicated I could get them for less than half that at REI -- and I would be near an REI outlet that weekend.
In the first case I was sacrificing more than a couple of dollars for speed and improved chances of a satisfactory transaction, in the second the money saved was less relevant than the fact that I'd be near an REI store soon anyway and it's always fun to browse their aisles.
Anyway, I guess my point is that there lots of criteria people use in Amazon visits and their Web usage in general. I visit Hacker News and Amazon "regularly" but it seems foolish to conclude from the frequency of my visits any correlation in my reasons or implied value, even if someone dresses up their SWAG with an allusion to a 1956 psych paper. From an entrepreneurial perspective, I'd be much more interested in contrasting customer usage of Amazon, say, with the Google "shopping" tab. (Amazon does its best to induce browsing of products beyond what brought you to the site -- how successful are they, I wonder?)
For everyday use, I find Ubuntu good enough, although I do wish they'd break fewer things every six months. I suspect I'll eventually migrate my Arch usage from "tinkering" to everyday usage.
Another thought: Tiny Core Linux - a minimalist distribution that runs out of RAM. The ISO image is only 10 MB, and the design is based on only loading those applications you need when you're using them. There are tons of applications already packaged online, so many people find it sufficient as their everyday OS. Personally, I put it in the tinkering category like Arch because the design is based on a specific design attitude that's different from the mainline distributions.
Highlighting the lineage aspect, however, loses useful context information. For example, Robert Shingledecker was a significant part of the development of Damn Small Linux for five years before he started the Tiny Core Linux project. While there's no commonality in the distribution-specific code that I'm aware of, and hence no reason for a graphic connection on the chart, I think it's safe to say that Tiny Core's design is a continuation of Shingledecker's thinking on what makes a good minimal Linux.
I'm not an expert on the ancient Greeks, but the last I heard there wasn't much evidence of a written language during the Greek Dark Ages. But to jump from what we know of Greek culture from written remnants (plays and poetry) it would seem to place a great deal of emphasis on "linearity".
Take the Method of Loci used to, ahem, memorize the "linear" points of a speech or argument. While it's true that you can access points at random, that doesn't take away from the fact that they are staged and memorized in a specific order for presentation.
Bottom line, I think you're accepting the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis uncritically. It seems so reasonable, but when you get down to specifics -- like the actual number of words for snow in English and Innuit -- it just doesn't pan out. Similarly, I think anyone who's read Adler and Van Doren's pre-Internet "How to Read a Book" would scoff at Carr's notion that books can't be an interactive medium. People can be mentally lazy using any media.
It's said that van Vogt would sometimes rely on unconscious processing and "dream logic" (for want of a better term) in his writing processes, so those sentences you noticed might well have been both "accidental" and unconsciously intentional.
I've had a couple of bosses who worked hard and expected the managers to work hard too. They were also bosses who believed in sharing the wealth when the company succeeded. Which makes me wonder how many pieces of the puzzle (like his apology/clarification memo) we're not privy to.
Generally speaking, warm fuzzy bosses don't mean spit to a stock's price, while layoffs can sometimes improve it. The perception that a division's managers are ineffectual, however, could hurt a lot. The story that a CEO was starting to kick managerial ass could improve investor's assessment of the company's chances. Certainly the price data supports the argument that the CEO's actions stopped the price erosion.